The Augustinian Epic, Petrarch to Milton

2. Renaissance Allegories of the Aeneid: The Doctrine of the Two Venuses and the Epic of the Two Cities

chapter two Renaissance Allegories of the Aeneid The Doctrine of the Two Venuses and the Epic of the Two Cities =< vergil between petrarch and tasso In the ‹rst of a series of “discourses on Vergil,” published posthumously as the Sopra Virgilio Discorso, Sperone Speroni has harsh words indeed for the portrayal of Venus in Aeneid 4. Now this fourth book displays the grand stupidity of Venus, she who rescues Aeneas by way of the help of the Carthaginians, in so far as he is harbored by her in Carthage. For she then inspires love in Aeneas for Dido as she does Dido for Aeneas, and were it not for the admonition of Jove delivered through Mercury, it would have been the case that Venus, more than Juno herself, had obstructed Aeneas’s going to Italy.1 In the ‹fth discourse, Speroni repeats his criticism of Aeneas’s mother with even more exasperation: “she had Dido fall in love with Aeneas, and consented with Juno that they would be wedded, to the harm of Venus and to the satisfaction of Juno. A ridiculous affair.”2 In this censure of a nodding Vergil by a renowned Aristotelian critic 51 (and acquaintance of Torquato Tasso at Padua), we encounter an interpretive practice that refuses any appeal to allegorical explanations for behavior that seems inexplicable if it is assessed in terms of narrative logic or consistency of motive, as Speroni insists it should be. By either criterion, there is no need for Venus to take her extra precautions to protect Aeneas’s destiny —to “revolve in her breast new wiles” and “new schemes” (Aeneid 1.657–58) to ensure Dido’s favorable reception of Aeneas and his shipwrecked crew—for Jupiter has already arranged for that reception through Mercury: Maia genitum demittit ab alto, ut terrae utque novae pateant Karthaginis arces hospitio Teucris, ne fati nescia Dido ‹nibus arceret. volat ille per aera magnum remigio alarum ac Libyae citus astitit oris. et iam iussa facit, ponuntque ferocia Poeni corda volente deo; in primis regina quietum accipit in Teucros animum mentemque benignam. (1.297–304) [He sends the son of Maia down from heaven, so that the land and towers of newly founded Carthage may be open in hospitality for the Teucrians, and Dido, ignorant of fate, might not protect her borders. He ›ies through the air on the oarage of his wings and soon alights on Libyan shores. Now he obeys the command, and by the god’s wish the Phoenicians lay aside their ferocity; above all, the queen adopts a gentle spirit and benign disposition toward the Teucrians.] Given Jupiter’s orders and Mercury’s swift obedience, it is counterproductive for Venus to incite an insatiable passion in Dido, because it ultimately means that Mercury has to make another trip (4.259–78)—or, rather, two trips, if we include his appearance to Aeneas in a dream, when Mercury again admonishes the poem’s sluggish hero to set sail for Italy (4.554–70). As Speroni complains, Venus’s actions in this episode interfere with her own interests: love keeps Aeneas in Carthage, and when, against his will, he is at last impelled to order his ships readied for departure, Dido’s passion turns to a frenzied despair that could well have led (as Mercury warns in 4.563–68) not to her suicide but to murderous vengeance against Aeneas and his companions. We have already seen, in Petrarch’s exegesis of the Aeneid, an allegorical the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 52 < interpretation of Venus that conveniently removes this problem of her apparently inconsistent motives and self-defeating behavior. Following ancient and medieval sources that are discussed in this chapter, Petrarch credits the origin of this interpretation, called “the doctrine of the two Venuses” or “two Aphrodites,” to Plato; he refers to it as “that most famous doctrine of Plato” (famosissimum dogma platonicum [2003, 101]). There is, explains Pausanias in the Symposium, a younger, “earthly Aphrodite,” whose offspring Love “governs the passions of the vulgar” and “does his work entirely at random,” as well as an elder Aphrodite, whose “intellectual ” and “heavenly Love” is “innocent of any hint of lewdness” (Plato 1961, 181c–d).3 Thus, Petrarch can explain, while Venus represents lust in most passages of the Aeneid, in other places she may represent “delight in the accomplishment and in good and honest pleasure,”4 and though it is true that Venus means to look after her son and protect him from Juno’s anger and from hostile nations, when it comes to opportunities to incite love in human hearts, she will be obliged by her nature to do so, even if it seems arbitrary or contrary to her aims as her son’s protector. Hence, when Petrarch interprets the reason for Venus appearing to Aeneas during the destruction of Troy in Aeneid 2 and for stopping him from taking revenge on Helen, even “excusing Helen and Paris” for their lust, he simply asks his correspondent, Aretino, “But why shouldn’t Venus excuse venereal acts, when often even strict censurers are given to indulgence in love?”5 Yet I submit that in medieval and Renaissance commentaries on the Aeneid, the function of the doctrine of the two Venuses extends beyond its utility for explaining away seeming contradictions. The following chapters argue that it serves also as an underlying trope and device for posing interpretive and spiritual challenges in the epics of Vida, Tasso, Ross, and Milton . Such a purpose, we might say, is a natural one for a twofold Venus, who is now earthly or vulgar passion, a symbol of lust, now protective and divine mother, a symbol of heavenly love or honest pleasures: in these facets, she corresponds roughly to the pairs of contrasting images of women in Christian discourse—Eve, who brought sin into the world, and Mary, the “second Eve” who redeems the sins of the ‹rst; or woman as the devil’s gateway versus the Church as the bride of Christ, with Christ’s sacri‹ce making man’s entry through the gates of heaven possible. But additionally, this image of Venus supplies a facilitator and an emblem for the Aeneid’s own saga of glory attained by way of negative via: Aeneas will gain “Lavinian shores” and establish New Troy only after replaying the crime that brought Old Troy to its destruction. The cause of the “wars, the Renaissance Allegories of the Aeneid 53 = grim wars” (bella, horrida bella [Aeneid 6.86]) that the Cumaean Sibyl prophesies will have to be endured to win the Trojans a home in Italy “is again an alien bride, again a foreign marriage” (causa mali tanti coniunx iterum hospita Teucris / externique iterum thalami [6.93–94]). Thus Lavinia will be a second Helen and Aeneas a second Paris; or more accurately , in Italy, Aeneas will play the role of Paris for a second time but in a different way, because he did so ‹rst at Carthage with Dido (as Iarbus charges at 4.215, calling him “ille Paris”). In Carthage, Aeneas was, like the ‹rst Paris, under the sway of the earthly Venus. In Italy, he will instead enjoy the protection of the heavenly Venus, now in her role as safeguard of the Roman race, so that the alien bride and foreign marriage will be (as Pausanius says of the heavenly Aphrodite) “innocent of any hint of lewdness .” Aeneas will there achieve his destiny, founding a dynastic line that has been promised empire without end by Jupiter in heaven. Was it in some way necessary, then, for Aeneas to rehearse the role of Paris at Carthage, to his temporary shame, before he could play the role in Italy to his everlasting fame? We may be right to sense, in other words, that in some way the burning desire that is fanned in Dido when Venus schemes to “kindle the queen to madness and spread the ›ame throughout her marrow” (furentem / incendat reginam atque ossibus implicet ignem [1.659–60]) is linked with, though opposed to, the burning desire that is sparked in Aeneas by the parade of future Roman generations who pass before his eyes in the underworld, the sight of which “kindled his soul with love of coming fame” (incenditque animum famae venientis amore [6.889]). We are witnesses , then, not to the “grand stupidity of Venus” but to Jupiter’s grand design. Additionally, for Christian interpreters and imitators of the Aeneid, the doctrine of the two Venuses provides the classical grounds for Augustine’s discovery that the Aeneid’s epic plot and generic features are suited to a narrative of spiritual progress, as well as the grounds for their own presumption that spiritual progress is the stuff of epic poetry.6 Having these two Venuses is like having an angel and a devil at the ear of Everyman, who is consequently torn between good and evil desires. His journey through the world and through time represents his advancement toward being wholly good, wholly under the in›uence of the heavenly Venus. The enabling link, in his story, between the pagan and Christian imaginative spheres is the image of the city—for cities are not cities so much as they are base or noble conditions of the mind or soul. Hence, the hero’s aim is to escape (as do Aeneas and Augustine) from the Carthage of the heart, the earthly city govthe augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 54 < erned by the earthly Venus, and to strive to reach the city that symbolizes a pure soul and is nurtured by the heavenly Venus—that is, to be among the number of the elect who are bound for the City of God.7 The Africa conforms to this template, not, of course, because Scipio is a Christian pilgrim whose odyssey takes him from wretchedness to salvation, but because Petrarch is such a pilgrim, claiming at least some small progress for his soul’s journey, on the basis of having written this epic account of Rome’s defeat of Carthage ‹guring chastity’s defeat of lust. In some ways that are obvious, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata is the epic account of the City of God conquering the city of the earthly Venus, but in several ways that have not been noted, the allegory of this poem builds upon two major precedents: the allegory of Petrarch’s Africa and the allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid, to which Petrarch contributed. This chapter serves to bridge our analyses of Petrarch’s and Tasso’s epics by tracing the developing connection between the doctrine of the two Venuses and the idea of an “epic of two cities” in successive commentaries on the Aeneid, culminating in its fullest elaboration in Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses. There, we shall see, Landino de‹nes Aeneas’s ultimate destination as a life devoted to contemplation of higher things, a state of pure intellect nurtured by the divine Venus that corresponds to residence in the heavenly city. But furthermore, Landino expands the signi‹cance of the story of Aeneas and Dido in book 4 of the Aeneid accordingly , to represent the contrasting values of the earthly city ruled by the earthly Venus so that it represents not only lust but all the desires and cares of a life devoted to the earthly city of men. In this way, Landino’s commentary on book 4 should not be considered, as it is commonly, “his most remarkable departure from the general critical tradition of Aeneid commentary ” (Kallendorf 1983, 541). It is, rather, a logical extension of ideas in that tradition, a making explicit of what had long been implied—in Augustine ’s Confessions and The City of God, in commentary on Vergil’s epic, and in Petrarch’s Augustinian epic—by the ‹gural relation between the contrasting Venuses, the contrasting cities of Carthage and Rome, and the contrasting cities of man and God. petrarch between servius and landino Don Cameron Allen has remarked that the earliest surviving commentaries on Vergil’s Aeneid (ca. fourth century) offer contrasting models of exegetical practice. The annotations of Donatus, on the one hand, “are as literal as Renaissance Allegories of the Aeneid 55 = those of Aristarchus on Homer,” in that he “scrupulously omits any moral or physical form of interpretation”; on the other hand, in the annotations of Servius—who “introduces the very important word ‘polysemus’ into the critical vocabulary of Europe” in his explication of the Aeneid’s very ‹rst line (see Servius 1961, 1:6)—we ‹nd moral and allegorical interpretations alongside the lexical, grammatical, and rhetorical notes (D. Allen 1970, 137).8 Yet in Servius, allegorical readings are almost haphazard. They are limited to scattered moralizations on the myths, to numerology and historical prophecy (e.g., the three Punic Wars are signi‹ed by Dido rolling three times on her deathbed), and to explanations of the gods as physical or natural forces (e.g., Juno’s relationship with Jove as both sister and wife is said to correspond to the different relations that air has to ether and ‹re).9 When we move to the commentary attributed to Fabius Planciadus Fulgentius (ca. ‹fth or sixth century), we encounter a comprehensive allegorical account of the Aeneid’s ‹rst six books, the well-known “stages of man” interpretation that has Aeneas moving from infancy through adolescence to maturity over the course of his adventures. In book 4, we are told, Aeneas is in the “blindness of adolescence,” and with his “soul on holiday from paternal control,” he “goes off hunting, is in›amed by passion and, driven on by storm and cloud, that is, by confusion of mind, commits adultery .”10 The assertion that Aeneas’s soul is “on holiday from paternal control ” (feriatus . . . a paterno iudicio) is interesting for its distinction between the positive in›uence of the father and the negative effect of his “vulgar” mother, for Aeneas is anything but liberated from her control. It was she who informed him of Dido’s history—starting with the details of her widowhood —and who then directed Aeneas to Dido’s city. Next she in›amed Dido with love for Aeneas and agreed to cooperate (at least, not to interfere ) with Juno’s scheme to brew up a storm, to arrange for Aeneas and Dido to ‹nd shelter in the same cave, and to oversee what Fulgentius calls their “adultery.” This is the Venus who blinds the soul and confuses the mind, the goddess of shameful loves, not the protective mother who shrouds Aeneas with mist so that he can travel unmolested or who provides him with Vulcan’s armor. Venus is not associated with heavenly love or a love of wisdom in Fulgentius’s imagination, for that role is assigned to Mercury, “the god of the intellect,” who descends to prompt Aeneas toward the next stage of his maturation. We are only reminded that “it is by the urging of the intellect that youth quits the straits of passion,” and like Dido on the pyre, “passion perishes and dies of neglect”; it is “burnt to ashes, . . . disintegrates,” because “when lust is driven from the heart of youth by the power of the mind, it burns out, buried in the ashes of oblivion.”11 All the the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 56 < same, as we see in this excerpt, we have in Fulgentius the notion that Aeneas’s story represents Everyman’s ideal progress from culpa to a state of virtue and wisdom, with his escape from lust being the climactic event in this progress. That idea is underscored in the meeting between Aeneas and the spirit of Dido in book 6, where Fulgentius tells us that “Dido is seen, a shade now void of passion and its former lust,” and that “this lust, long dead of indifference, is tearfully recalled to mind as, now penitent, Aeneas re›ects on wisdom.”12 The twelfth-century commentary on the Aeneid commonly attributed to Bernardus Silvestris shows us that the “stages of man” interpretation retained its appeal and was much re‹ned over the centuries. “One must remember,” Bernard instructs us, that in Vergil’s poem “as well as in other allegorical works . . . there are equivocations and multiple signi‹cations, and therefore one must interpret poetic ‹ctions in diverse ways.”13 Much like Fulgentius, Bernard asserts that “in the fourth book Vergil allegorically expresses the nature of young manhood,” with Aeneas being driven “by excitement of the ›esh” into the cave with Dido and into “impurity of the ›esh and of desire.”14 “This impurity of the ›esh is called a cave,” says Bernard, “since it beclouds the clarity of mind and of discretion”; Aeneas “is united with Dido” at this point “and remains with her a while”—despite “the public disgrace of a bad reputation”—“because a young man, having been snared by passion, does not know ‘what is beautiful, what is disgraceful , what is useful, or anything else.’”15 Likewise following Fulgentius, Bernard states that “Dido dies” after “having been abandoned,” because “abandoned passion ceases and, consumed by the heat of manliness, goes to ashes, that is, to solitary thoughts.”16 So again, Dido’s suicide marks a stage in Aeneas’s advance toward wisdom .17 That is evident from the preceding excerpts, but by itself this statement inadequately conveys Bernard’s thinking about the Carthaginian queen. We discover, by examining three other passages of his commentary, that Dido represents something more complicated than just an emblem of youthful lust to be rejected by a maturing Aeneas. The ‹rst is in Bernard’s exegesis of book 1, where he explains the signi‹cance of Aeneas’s parentage. His father, Anchises, whose name means “inhabiting the heavens,” we are to interpret as “the father of all who presides over all.”18 On the signi‹cance of his mother, Bernard says: we read that there are indeed two Venuses, one lawful, and the other the goddess of lust. The lawful Venus is the harmony of the world, that is, the even proportion of worldly things, which some call Renaissance Allegories of the Aeneid 57 = Astrea, and others call natural justice. . . . The shameless Venus, however, the goddess of lust, is carnal concupiscence which is the mother of all fornications.19 Bernard advises us to stay alert to Venus’s shifting identity, to distinguish between the love goddess who “sometimes designates concupiscence of the ›esh” but at other times represents “the concord of the world.” He explains, whenever you ‹nd Venus as the wife of Vulcan, the mother of Jocus and Cupid, interpret her as pleasure of the ›esh, which is joined with natural heat and causes pleasure and copulation; but whenever you read that Venus and Anchises have a son Aeneas, interpret that Venus as the harmony of the world and Aeneas as the human spirit.20 Bernard’s invocation here of the doctrine of two Venuses is interesting in part for the way it sets up a contrast not only between a negative and positive Venus but also between both Venuses and Aeneas’s “heavenly father,” who symbolizes “the father of all who presides over all,” or in the language of Christian allegoresis that Bernard’s language parallels, the Father in Heaven guiding Everyman to his ultimate destination. Hence Aeneas, as the son of Anchises and as the leader of the Trojan exiles to safety, may be interpreted typologically by Bernard’s readers as a ‹gure for Christ, the Son of God and Savior of Man. For those habituated to identifying multiple senses of scripture, such a reading would surely have seemed an elementary operation, even if unorthodox (given the pagan text). It is as readily apparent that a “lawful Venus” who represents “natural justice,” “the harmony of the world,” or “the even proportion of worldly things” must ‹nd herself the subservient spouse to an Anchises who symbolizes the Father in Heaven, because law, justice, harmony, and proportion have their source in God as do all things that are good, and wisdom reveals that they are not ends in themselves. If treated as such, they would distract the good man from his heavenly destination as surely as would the “shameless Venus,” that “mother of all fornications.” These implications of Bernard’s commentary on Aeneas’s parentage clarify his subsequent remarks on Aeneas’s entry into Carthage, which seem at ‹rst barely to pertain to “young manhood” about to be “snared by passion.” Bernard notes that in Vergil’s poem, Aeneas is “hidden under a the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 58 < cloud” as he “comes to Carthage,” a cloud that Venus has cast to shield him from Carthaginian eyes until a propitious moment for his appearance in the city. Bernard explains: “just as a cloud obscures light, so too does ignorance obscure wisdom”; therefore, “in ignorance [Aeneas] comes to Carthage, that is, to the new city of the world, the city which indeed has all inhabitants in itself” (my emphasis).21 Carthage, in this formulation, is not merely, not strictly, a city of sin or a state of adolescent lust. It is by synecdoche the world and all its inhabitants, the world of men living in ignorance and governed by the earthly passions that the earthly Venus symbolizes . Bernard’s statement immediately following functions in the same way: “Dido, that is, passion [libido], rules this city.”22 Dido is not just a ‹gure of lust but, again by synecdoche, the representative of all the earthly passions that distract a man from wisdom and from heaven. Another way to characterize the allegorical signi‹cance of Dido and Carthage in Bernard’s commentary is as a con›ation of the earthly Venus and Juno, where Juno symbolizes “the active life” in the city of man. Bernard’s discussion of the Judgment of Paris provides the terms for this idea. One reads that the three goddesses Juno, Pallas, and Venus approached Paris so that he might judge which of them should have the golden apple. We interpret Pallas as the life of contemplation; Juno, the active life; Venus, the life of pleasure. . . . Certain people such as philosophers prefer the contemplative life over the others; certain people such as politicians, the active life; certain people such as the Epicureans, the life of ease over the active and the contemplative . Venus seems more beautiful to Paris, because the senses place contemplation and action below pleasure, and therefore Pallas and Juno take revenge upon Troy. Because it is pleasing for the senses to wallow in pleasures, it is very painful to the ›esh to contemplate or act.23 The assertion that Paris and Troy were destroyed for being bound to shameful pleasure recalls the interpretation of the Aeneid that we encountered in chapter 1 in Petrarch’s Seniles 4.5. But if Pallas and Juno team up to “take revenge upon Troy,” then it must be Pallas, “the life of contemplation ,” who alone destroys Carthage, which is Juno’s city but whose ruler has succumbed to a “life of pleasure.” In Carthage, in other words, the earthly Venus and Juno have teamed up to stall Aeneas in his journey to Renaissance Allegories of the Aeneid 59 = wisdom by means of a culpa that Dido will mask by the name of marriage, that moralists will call adultery and lust, and that spiritual allegorizers will understand as a sinful devotion to the things of this world. It still is not explicit, but the various allegorical functions of Dido, Carthage, Venus, and Juno may, without too much violence, be lumped under one heading, idolatry , the worship of earthly things as false gods, with lust being the part that stands for the whole. That point returns us again to Petrarch’s allegorical reading of the Aeneid, clarifying for us a feature of his commentary on Aeneas’s fated marriage with Lavinia and con›ict with Turnus. King Latinus, we recall Petrarch saying, “is the mind,” while “her mother is the ›esh betrothed to the mind” (2003, 87; see chap. 1 n. 35). In the same place, he explains that Lavinia is “destined by fate for one of foreign blood (that is, for painstaking explorations into dif‹cult and unknown things)”24—that is, for a life of contemplation. Her “weaker” mother desires to see Lavinia married to Turnus, “that is, to carnal desires and earthly endeavors,” because these represent the life of pleasure and the active life that are in opposition to the contemplative life. The “new city” or “New Troy” that will be founded upon the marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia will be a city not “of the world” but of the mind and of God. It is a very big step, to be sure, from the allegorizing imaginations of Bernard and Petrarch to that of Cristoforo Landino. But we shall see that it is a logically consistent one. Bridging the gap between them, moreover, is one other precedent in the tradition of Vergiliana: the “thirteenth book” of the Aeneid by Maffeo Vegio, which “completes” the poem according to prompts of the allegorical commentaries that we have so far reviewed.25 Vegio’s Supplement, as it was usually titled, was written in 1428 but ‹rst printed in 1471 (at Venice); for nearly two centuries afterward , it was included in most editions of the Aeneid and Vergil’s Opera.26 It picks up where the Aeneid leaves off, with “magnanimus Aeneas” (3) standing over the body of conquered Turnus, and it proceeds with the action as we would expect it to unfold: Aeneas takes the belt of his friend Pallas from Turnus and returns it to King Evander; the fallen warriors are honored, and the victors, foremost among them Aeneas’s son Iulus, are congratulated; peace is established between the Italians and Trojans, and Aeneas begins to lay out the foundations of the new city; but then, as Jupiter foretells in book 1, our hero expires and (as the Supplement’s “argumentum” puts it), “Venus conveys the blessed Aeneas to the highest stars.”27 Our focus is on the role of Venus and the image of the city in the Supthe augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 60 < plement’s ‹nal scenes. Vegio tells us that, after the wedding feast for Aeneas and Lavinia had extended into its ninth day, “then the great hero Aeneas began to inscribe a city with curved plough, and he established homes and trenches enclosed by a rampart” (tum maximus heros / Aeneas urbem curvo signabat aratro / fundabatque domos et amictas aggere fossas [537–39]). This phrasing echoes and invites us to contrast a parallel passage in book 5 of the Aeneid, where Aeneas is described plotting the city of Acesta in Sicily, to be occupied by those among his Trojan companions who are “old men far advanced in age, matrons wearied by the sea,” and the younger men who are “weak and afraid of danger” (longaevosque senes ac fessas aequore matres / . . . invalidum metuensque pericli [5.715–16]). Aeneas urbem designat aratro sortiturque domos; hoc Ilium et haec loca Troiam esse iubet. (5.755–57) [Aeneas marks out the city with a plow and allots homes; this he declares to be Ilium and these lands Troy.] Vergil refers to the healthy men who only lack courage and faith to reach the site of future Rome as “souls with no craving for high praise” (animos nil magnae laudis egentis [5.751]), and Aeneas—as if to console them, but perhaps to remind them forever of their wasted travels—bestows on their new home the place-names of the ruins that they had left behind. Just as in book 3, when Aeneas and his band visited the “little Troy” built by Helenus, with its “semblance of great Pergamus and a dry brook by the name of Xanthus ” (parvam Troiam sumulataque magnis / Pergama et arentem Xanthi cognomine rivum [3.349–50]), this city in Sicily is a sorry substitute for the “empire without end” promised to Aeneas and the gens Iulia. Vegio reemphasizes this point—that the only meaningful new city is the one to which Aeneas is destined—through his allusion to the lines from book 5 and by the sudden arrival of a sign from the heavens, which he describes immediately following, as soon as Aeneas begins to lay out his city. Ecce autem, fatu haud parvum, diffundere ›ammam ingentem et fulgore levem et se nubibus altis miscentem e summo Lavinia vertice visa est. (540–42) Renaissance Allegories of the Aeneid 61 = [But behold, by heavy fate, Lavinia seemed to pour forth from her head’s crown a ›ame both vast and gentle in its fulgence, which mingled with the high clouds.] In one respect, Vegio is merely innovating on Vergil’s accounts of ›ames that descend from heaven to touch the head of the blessed, indicating the ful‹llment of decrees that were stated earlier in the Aeneid. One occurs in Aeneid 2, as a sign to Aeneas and his father to escape from the destroyers of Troy so as to safeguard the Trojan race and Rome’s destiny through Iulus: ecce levis summo de vertice visus Iuli fundere lumen apex, tactuque innoxia mollis lambere ›amma comas et circum tempora pasci. (2.682–84) [Behold, from high above the head of Iulus a light was seen cast down, a ›ame with harmless touch that licked his soft locks and coursed about his temples.] Another such ›ame alights upon Lavinia’s head in book 7, indicating her part in Rome’s future glory. Lavinia virgo, visa, nefas, longis comprendere crinibus ignem atque omnem ornatum ›amma crepitante cremari, regalisque accensa comas . . . (7.72–75) [The maiden Lavinia was seen, oh horror, to have her long locks wrapped in ‹re, all her adornment burned by a rustling ›ame, and her regal hair ablaze . . . ] In Vegio’s Supplement, when “father Aeneas” sees the marvelous portent , he is “astounded” (Obstipuit pater Aeneas [543]), and immediately he prays to Jupiter to give some sign of what more is asked of him or to con‹rm that he has earned peaceful retirement. Just at this point, Venus appears, and “with kindly speech” (almo . . . ore [551]), she assures her son that the ›ame symbolizes the “coming praises of your race” (ventura tuae praeconia gentis [567]). This is the heavenly Venus, obviously, whose participation in the episode is “innocent of any hint of lewdness.” Whereas the the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 62 < earthly Venus sent a love-›ame through Dido’s marrow, this Venus descends to interpret the meaning of a ›ame that travels up to heaven, a ›ame that anticipates Aeneas’s own journey thither upon his marriage to Lavinia. After her speech to Aeneas, she ascends to heaven to ask Jupiter to grant her son immortality with the rest of the gods (for this scene, Vegio is drawing on the account of Aeneas’s translation in Metamorphoses 14.581–607—though, to be sure, without any hint of Ovid’s ironic tone). “For now,” she explains to Jupiter, “Aeneas’s mature virtue longs for the heavens” (Iamque optat matura polos Aeneia virtus [605]).28 The phrase “matura virtus” is Vegio’s nod to the “stages of man” interpretation of the Aeneid: the good man has attained the ‹nal stage of his progress; his goodness is fully mature. It is a mark of this maturity that Aeneas is not really thinking about the city that he is in the process of plotting; he instead “longs for the heavens”—meditating on death and the afterlife. On this basis, he is ripe for heaven: when he dies shortly after, at his allotted time, Venus “with joy led his renewed and happy soul with her up above the air” (laeta recentem / felicemque animam secum super aera duxit [627–28]). Aeneas’s “happy soul” in these lines ‹nally supplies the resolution that had been lacking—the positive counterimage not only to the unhappy spirit of Dido, who, “still hostile” to Aeneas when they met in the Fields of Mourning , “›ed” from him “into the shady grove” (tandem . . . inimica refugit / in nemus umbriferum [Aeneid 6.456, 472–73]),29 but also to Turnus, whose soul, in what was formerly the poem’s last line, “›ew indignant to the shades below” (fugit indignata sub umbras [12.952]). the two venuses and the city of the soul: cristoforo landino’s disputationes camaldulenses By 1473, Cristoforo Landino completed work on an elaborate allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid based largely on ideas he had acquired from his association with Marsilio Ficino and the so-called Platonic Academy at Florence, under the patronage of Lorenzo de’Medici.30 The result occupies books 3 and 4 of a treatise in dialogue form, ‹rst referred to as Quaestiones Camaldulenses, later published as Disputationes Camaldulenses (the ‹rst known edition in Florence in 1481), and ‹nally retitled the Allegorica Platonica in two sixteenth-century Basel editions of the Aeneid to which it was appended in 1577 and 1596.31 The principal speaker in the dialogue is Leon Battista Alberti, with Lorenzo taking the role of primary questioner among Renaissance Allegories of the Aeneid 63 = a dozen or so others at the gathering, including Marsilio Ficino, the great translator and exegete of Plato’s dialogues. It would have been in Ficino’s writings that Landino knew the fullest account of the doctrine of the two Venuses, and this is signi‹cant because it provides an even stronger basis than Vegio’s suggestive ending of the Supplement for associating a heavenly Venus in the Aeneid with the life of contemplation (alongside Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom, as in Bernardus Silvestris) and with a yearning for heaven, thereby making it fully explicit for Landino that this one allegorical ‹gure could embody the oppositional vice and virtue—carnal pleasure and contemplative wisdom—that de‹ne the starting and ending points of Aeneas’s epic journey. We ‹nd this account in a section of Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium titled “On the Two Types of Love, and the Dual Nature of Venus” (De duobus amoris generisbus, ac de duplici Venere [2.7]).32 Here Ficino repeats the conventional idea that “Venus is two-fold,” and he de‹nes her two aspects in a manner that re›ects his assumption of a basic consistency between Platonic philosophy and Christian faith: “one is clearly that intelligence which we said was in the Angelic Mind,” while “the other is the power of generation with which the World-Soul is endowed.”33 Because this section goes on to develop further the association of the doctrine of the two Venuses with the Christian ideas that are basic to the epics we are examining, it is worth quoting a substantial excerpt. Each Venus, Ficino continues, “has as consort a similar Love.” The ‹rst, by innate love is stimulated to know the beauty of God; the second, by its love, to procreate the same beauty in bodies. The former Venus ‹rst embraces the Glory of God in herself, and then translates it to the second Venus. This latter Venus translates sparks of that divine glory into earthly matter. It is because of the presence of sparks of this kind that an individual body seems beautiful to us, in proportion to its merits. The human soul perceives the beauty of these bodies through the eyes. The soul also has two powers. It certainly has the power of comprehension, and it has the power of generation . These two powers in us are the two Venuses which are accompanied by their twin Loves. When the beauty of a human body ‹rst meets our eyes, the mind, which is the ‹rst Venus in us, worships and adores the human beauty as an image of the divine beauty, and through the ‹rst, it is frequently aroused to the second. But the power of generation in us, which is the second Venus, the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 64 < desires to create another form like this. Therefore, there is a Love in each case: in the former, it is the desire of contemplating Beauty; and in the latter, the desire of propagating it; both loves are honorable and praiseworthy, for each is concerned with the divine image. Of what, therefore, does Pausanias disapprove in love? I shall tell you. If a man is too eager for procreation and gives up contemplation , or is immoderately desirous of copulation with women, or consorts unnaturally with men, or prefers the beauty of the body to that of the soul, insofar he abuses the dignity of love. It is this abuse of love which Pausanias censures. Therefore, a man who properly respects love praises, of course, the beauty of the body; but through it he contemplates the more excellent beauty of the soul, the mind, and God, and admires and loves this more fervently than the other.34 In this passage, we recognize the characteristically Augustinian distinction between the proper use and culpable abuse of God’s gifts.35 We should also observe how this emphasis distinguishes Ficino’s conception of the second Venus from that of the medieval Vergil commentators. She is “earthly,” but she is not a symbol of shameful lust for Ficino, for the desire to “procreate beauty” in this world only becomes lust when a man abandons the contemplative life for carnal desire. In this sense, then, to say that a pilgrim on his journey may come under the power of the goddess of shameful passion is really to observe that he has the power to transform the symbol of Venus into one of lust, by misusing beauty and abusing the dignity of love when he should be pursuing his quest “to know the beauty of God.” This opposition between proper and improper love, or beauty’s proper use versus its abuse, is adopted and extended in Landino’s allegory of the Aeneid to inform the notion of a corresponding opposition between a proper and improper active life.36 These oppositions are coupled in the explication of Dido and the city of Carthage, suggesting even more strongly the synecdochical relation that was implied in Bernard’s commentary between lust and earthly desires in general. Landino is also more explicit than Bernard in conceiving Aeneas’s journey of the soul to be consistent with the experience of Christian pilgrimage.37 At one point, in fact, Alberti pauses in his commentary on the poem to exclaim of its author: “O divine intellect! O excellent man even among the rarest of men and truly worthy of the name poet! who although not a Christian all that he uttered is most similar to the truest teachings of Christians. Read the Apostle Paul! . . . Renaissance Allegories of the Aeneid 65 = What indeed does he describe profusely and openly that [Vergil] does not encapsule in his sparer poetic style?”38 This is the aspect of Landino’s treatise that has been of most interest to scholars, naturally, for it supplies the sort of evidence that is looked for to document the endeavor of some Renaissance humanists to “Christianize Vergil” or at least to defend and accommodate the value of classical authors to a Christian world.39 In the context of this study, however, I am more speci‹cally interested in the way it supplies Christian epic poets with their spiritual plotline. The story of Aeneas, says Alberti to begin with, is of “a man who was gradually expiated of many great vices and ‹nally, having been adorned with marvellous virtues, attained that which is the highest human good and which no one can attain without being wise”; and that “highest good”—the summum bonum—as Vergil “had learned from Plato,” “consists in the contemplation of the divine.”40 As in Petrarch’s interpretation of the poem, the idea of the two Venuses is introduced in the explanation of the symbolic signi‹cance of Troy, which Alberti explains may be understood as “the ‹rst age of man, in which, since reason is yet asleep, the senses reign alone.”41 He notes that “both Paris and Aeneas were raised in Troy,” but “because one [Paris] prefers Venus over Pallas, that is, pleasure over virtue, it is necessary that he perish with Troy,” while Aeneas, on the other hand, is “ruled by his mother Venus” but “extricates himself from the con›agration.” Alberti avers, “What else may we understand by this, except that those who are urged toward a knowledge of the truth by a great love having been set ablaze in them are easily able to achieve anything? On this account we will rightly interpret Venus as divine love.”42 At the prompting of Lorenzo, Alberti expands upon his explanation of the two Venuses. First (at 125) he reminds his listeners of the earthly and heavenly Aphrodites described in the Phaedrus and the Symposium, and then he applies to Vergil (whom he calls at this point “Platonicus poeta”) the same ideas of Venus and love that we saw developed by Ficino. Alberti explains: Because the human soul itself has certain corresponding powers of contemplating and begetting, it is also said to have two Venuses, which are accompanied by twin desires. For when corporeal beauty is presented to our eyes, our mind, which is the ‹rst Venus, admires and loves it and is raised up by it, as if by a certain path, to heaven, not because it is corporeal but because it is an image of divine beauty, while the power of begetting, which is the second Venus, the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 66 < desires to beget a form similar to it. For this reason each is properly called love, in that one is the desire of contemplating beauty, the other of begetting it. No one, therefore, unless he is utterly devoid of reason, would dare condemn these two loves, since each is necessary to human nature; for the race of mortals would no longer exist without the propagation of offspring, and in turn neither would it exist well without investigations of the truth. Hence, guided by that more excellent Venus, Aeneas was able to arrive in Italy.43 As for Paris, contends Alberti, he was “harmed” by Venus “because he used her”—that is, he loved—“badly” (quia illa male usus est [126]). He was not able, like Aeneas, to free himself “from the Trojan blaze, that is, from the burning of carnal pleasures.”44 Alberti’s explanation of the Aeneid’s opening books continues to rely heavily on the doctrine of the two Venuses and the idea that Aeneas is struggling against the ›esh as he escapes Troy and makes his way over troubled waters to Italy (e.g., the monster Scylla in book 3 is said to symbolize lust). Because one of Aeneas’s parents was a goddess and the other one a mortal, notes Alberti, there “arises” in him “that unremitting and ‹erce struggle of the spirit against the ›esh, as we say, when the mind tries to draw the whole man to the divine and to bring the senses under its power.”45 But in the early books of the poem, Alberti explains, Aeneas “does not yet know in what the summum bonum consists,” so “he is justly called an exile.”46 Aeneas is yet susceptible to abusing the dignity of love, as Ficino would say. And indeed, Aeneas will misuse “corporeal beauty” when he sees it in “the most beautiful Dido” (pulcherimma Dido), as Vergil twice describes the queen of Carthage (Aeneid 1.496, 4.60), whereas if we are properly guided by divine love, then the mind “meditates nothing else, strives for nothing else, labors in no other matter, attempts nothing else and endeavors nothing except that, aroused by the sight of corporeal beauty, it might take us to divine beauty.”47 Alberti af‹rms again later, “We will never arrive at true contemplation unless sensuality, to use a Christian word, is not only extinguished in us but truly and completely entombed.”48 So far, Landino’s version of the Aeneid’s allegory could be considered just a more highly wrought, Platonized version of the traditional “stages of man” interpretation, but when he treats the subject of Aeneas and Dido, he seems to many critics (as we have noted previously) to interpret the episode “in a radically different manner” than did his medieval predecessors.49 While Troy represents the life given over to pleasure and while Italy is “a Renaissance Allegories of the Aeneid 67 = ‹gure for contemplation,” explains Alberti, “Carthage is a ‹gure for action.”50 Yet it is crucial that we avoid the usual oversimpli‹cations about Landino’s allegory of this episode—that Carthage is a model republic, for example, or that Dido is not a ‹gure of lust but, instead, a ‹gure of the civic life—because, as indicated earlier, Landino posits a more complicated relationship between the life of carnal pleasure and the life of civic activity than just a maturation from one to the other. In the same way that corporeal beauty may be used improperly or properly, tending a man toward indignity or toward divine beauty, the civic virtues may be valued for their own sake or as a prompt toward the heavenly virtues. Says Alberti, invoking the language of the ‹rst moral to convey his point about the second, “When we have for a long time cultivated, on account of their beauty, those things in civic life which are honest and proper, we are led to the divine, of which they are as images.”51 When Aeneas and the Trojans arrive at the city of Carthage and enter upon the active life, therefore, they have the potential, as “they become adorned with civic virtues and gather no small praise,”52 to be spurred to know the virtues of God in the same way that they should long to know the beauty of God.53 Carthage is, at ‹rst, a seemingly ideal city in which the Trojans might dedicate themselves, temporarily, to a vitam socialem, as Alberti af‹rms: “[Its residents] have a leader whom they follow and whose rule they never condemn. They divide their labors among themselves with the utmost equity. They accomplish their works and ward off their enemies in supreme harmony. Whatever is sought, it is sought entirely in common .”54 “Indeed,” Alberti goes on to exclaim, “if you were to transfer all these qualities to a republic, you would establish a Platonic state.”55 Even so, the residents of Carthage “are a long way from that divine state that we are seeking,” Alberti asserts, for the active life in and of itself is without value: “the virtues of civic life are inchoate rather than absolute.”56 In Aeneid 4, Aeneas devotes himself to those inchoate civic virtues, for “having abandoned his plan of leaving,” observes Alberti, “he dedicates himself to building the arches of Carthage and renewing construction of its houses”; he also “joys in wearing purple and a bejeweled sword, which are both insignia of imperial rule.”57 That his distraction from a life of contemplation is owed also to his liaison with Dido betrays, for Landino, the basic equivalence of carnal passion and the active life enjoyed for its own ends, just as “carnal desires” and “earthly endeavors” were both symbolized by Turnus in Petrarch’s allegory. Both are forms of cupidity. Once Alberti explains, in the passage following, the relation between Aeneas’s desire for the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 68 < Dido and his desire to rule, these two passions are inextricably linked for the remainder of the dialogue. The desire to rule desires to marry Aeneas to Dido, that is, to put the superior man in command, but it is not strong enough to achieve this without the assent of love. But love recognizes that this kind of union bene‹ts Dido, not Aeneas; for it does not pro‹t the souls of men born for greater things, but only the empire itself. Hence it is better to advance toward true wisdom than to become diverted into activity, but if the administration of public matters is abandoned by the wise then inevitably love shall pass away from human affairs. Therefore, although it knows that what the desire to rule urges is false, it yet assents, whether because it is now entangled in that desire, or because it is moved by pity for those who must be helped.58 Note the way that the word amor, in this passage, strategically straddles the fence between divine and earthly senses. It signi‹es divine love insofar as it “knows” that the active life is “false,” prompts the man toward wisdom , and, one assumes, “is moved by pity.” But it can also be “entangled in desire” for the active life, as one seduced to carnal pleasures. Accordingly for Landino, Dido’s descent into shameful love corresponds to and ‹gures the “gradual fall into degradation” of men who are wholly devoted to civic virtues. Mirroring their fall, “she who had been most chaste and most vigilant in administering her realm is conquered by a shameful love and falls into lasciviousness and a life of ease.” “In all of these things it is shown,” says Alberti in sum, “how easily in times of prosperity human minds are diverted from labor to pleasure.”59 Conversely, Landino’s detailed analysis of Dido’s “fall” from civic virtue “into lasciviousness and a life of ease” is a negative mirror image of the scale of ascending virtues that he describes as leading from the active life to the life of contemplation. In Dido’s case, Alberti explains, just as “republics that rise up from small foundations are nobler at the start than at their fall, for that reason the queen at the beginning is temperate in all things, but a little later, with love surging within her, she slips from temperance into continence, and later being conquered by love she is rendered so incontinent that in the end she falls into the greatest intemperance.”60 We may contrast this scheme of moral descent with Alberti’s earlier one of “the triple order of human life” based on levels of “right thinking.” Renaissance Allegories of the Aeneid 69 = Of these three the lowest is occupied by those living the social and civic life who undertake the administration of public affairs. Next to them, but constituting a higher grade, are those who avoid public activity just as if ›eeing from a violent storm—in which the chance of fortune completely governs—into a tranquil harbor, retreating from the mayhem to a life of ease and quiet, but not, however, such a life that there is not something against which they must continue to struggle. Then in the highest order you will discover those who are completely removed from the throng and tumult of human affairs and engage in nothing that must be repented.61 The “highest order” of virtue, the life of contemplation, is the one that Aeneas neglects by having “undertaken the administration of his wife’s city,” as Alberti explains—but not only on the grounds that this city “represents a life dedicated to action.”62 The fact that it is Dido’s city and that her lust or abuse of the dignity of love—her culpa—functions in Landino’s imagination as an emblem of the abuse of civic virtues asserts once more a ‹gural link between lust and worldly cares in general.63 In addition, Alberti’s articulation of scales of moral descent and ascent, downward to depravity or upward to happiness, provides the epic with an itinerary of spiritual progress that is nearly as precise as the poem’s geographical description of the hero’s wanderings. Having been warned away from the active life, Aeneas is urged “to think of Ascanius, his heir and successor, to whom the kingdom of Italy and land of Rome is due,” as Alberti paraphrases Mercury. He then asks his listeners, “What else can we understand by Ascanius in this passage but that future and eternal life which follows this brief and temporary one?”64 The good man, in other words, progresses toward holiness by meditating on heaven and “the beauty of God,” but just as in Petrarch’s version of the Aeneid’s allegory, Aeneas still must battle the temptations of lust. The hero remains susceptible to backsliding, from contemplation to labor and “from labor to pleasure.” Says Alberti, “Aeneas has come into Italy with the kind of virtues that are called purgative, but before the mind can be completely cleansed by them a bitter war is necessary, just as we say that the spirit wars against the ›esh. For the higher that these virtues lie above our human weakness, the greater is the danger as we reach for them.”65 It is at this point, too, that Landino recalls the hero of Petrarch’s Africa as an exemplar not only of a man’s victory over the temptations of the ›esh but of contemplation in solitude. Quoting from Cicero’s De republica, Alberti remarks, “You cannot easily ‹nd a Scipio who is ‘never less alone than when alone.’”66 the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 70 < In 1488, Cristoforo Landino’s line-by-line commentary on the Aeneid appeared in an edition of Vergil’s works published in Venice (no. 26 in Kallendorf 1991), and this has sometimes been cited as evidence that Landino renounced the practice of allegorical interpretation upon the maturer considerations of his later years. This is not at all so. The commentary is merely scholarship in a different mode, as Landino clearly enough explains in the proem: “we took up the work of philosophical interpretation in the Camaldulenses, so in this commentary we instead furnish grammatical and rhetorical explanation.”67 Also, several times within the commentary itself, Landino encourages his readers to consult the Disputationes Camaldulenses for indispensible insights on various points. For example, in his commentary at the word “Mater” in Aeneid 1.314, where Venus appears before her son in the garb of a huntress, he writes: “Why Venus reveals herself to her son as a goddess when Troy is burning and here as a huntress, we explained in our Camaldulenses—which work, reader, I beg you not to ignore. You will see what lofty and profound meaning the divine poet hid beneath the ‹gures of this type of fable.”68 On occasion, Landino even incorporates some of his earlier allegorical interpretations into his commentary, and signi‹cantly, several instances occur in notes on the role of Venus and on Aeneas’s liaison with Dido. An example occurs in commentary on Aeneid 1.657–75, where Landino introduces the doctrine of the two Venuses, including a reference to “our Petrarch” (noster Petrarcha ), who “rightly asserts” that “lasciviousness . . . arises from ease and wantonness” (lascivia . . . ex ocio lasciviaque natum asserit [142r]). Later, on the opening lines of Aeneid 5, in which Aeneas and his crewmates are described looking back at the distant glow of Dido’s funeral pyre, Landino observes that “there was nothing else but for Aeneas to leave Dido, as we revealed in our allegory on how the excellent man was warned by Jove through Mercury, which is to say that through doctrine he learned to move from the active life to the contemplative life.”69 The Disputationes Camaldulenses , furthermore, continued to attract a readership in the sixteenth century, with independent editions in Venice, Strasbourg, and Paris, besides its inclusion in the two editions of Vergil’s works printed in Basel, mentioned earlier.70 It has yet to be considered to what extent the Basel edition of 1577, in which Landino’s dialogue was retitled the Allegorica Platonica, or to what extent the Italian paraphrase and elaboration of Landino’s allegory by Giovanni Fabrini, published in two Venice editions of Vergil’s L’Eneide in 1575–76 (nos. 104–5 in Kallendorf 1991), may have in›uenced the development of Tasso’s thinking about his own epic. When these editions of Vergil Renaissance Allegories of the Aeneid 71 = appeared—between 1575, when Tasso began to share drafts of his poem (then tentatively titled Goffredo), and 1581, the year Gerusalemme liberata was ‹rst published—the Aeneid was accompanied for the ‹rst time by extensive details of its allegorical meaning: in one case in a dialogue appended to the poem, and in the case of the Venice editions, fully incorporated into the line-by-line commentary. A unique feature of Fabrini’s commentary is his division of the content under various headings: for example, “The Arrangement of Words” (Ordine de le parole) and “Exposition of Words” (Expositione de le parole); “On Grammatically Dif‹cult Passages” (De luoghi grammaticali dif‹cili) and “Notes on the Rhetoric of Passages” (Annotationi de luoghi rettorici); “On the Fable” (Dele favole) and “On the History” (De le istorie); and, in forty separate places, “The Allegorical and Moral Meaning” (Sensi allegorici e morali).71 Don Cameron Allen’s assessment of Fabrini’s allegorical interpretations , that “often Fabrini adds nothing more to his great predecessor [Landino] than words, words, words” (1970, 160), is largely accurate. However , as Craig Kallendorf observes in his discussion of this commentary, Fabrini reaches for some heights that “cannot be squared with what Landino wrote,” when he suggests in several places that Vergil “was directly inspired by the Holy Spirit,” if not “conscious of the Christian meaning contained in his poem” (1995, 57–58). This inclination, on Fabrini’s part, not only to make more explicit the obvious parallels between Landino’s Platonized Aeneid and tenets of Christianity, but also to blend the language of Christian faith in with the interpretation of particular details in the poem, is revealed right from the start, when he explains that Aeneas’s departure from Troy represents his desire to leave “the ‹rst era of man, which is not ruled at all by reason, but by the senses,” and to move on not just to the active and contemplative life but to “the civil and holy life” (la vita civile, e santa [my emphasis]).72 One of the most explicit instances occurs in Fabrini’s commentary on the passage in which Jupiter sends Mercury down to Carthage to rouse Aeneas from his shameful dallying in the arms of Dido. Fabrini explains this “fable’s meaning” by way of our understanding that “God made the ‹rst man with twofold reason, that is, natural, and divine,” but “on account of his pride, God removed the divine understanding , and divided him,” so that “he was reduced to the natural like a beast, but having compassion for him, he ordered Mercury to reclaim him, as did Christ, who freed man, and repurchased him who was lost through his own sin: and thus man is now saved by the remedy of the Passion of Christ.”73 the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 72 < Fabrini’s conviction that, in his own words, “the opinion of Vergil is the opinion of a most holy, true Christian”74 was not widely shared, needless to say, so although his commentary was reprinted several times in the ‹fteenth and sixteenth centuries (with a last edition in 1710), I do not propose that it was in›uential in that respect. Fabrini’s commentary is signi‹cant, rather, for disseminating Landino’s allegory of the Aeneid in the vernacular tongue and possibly for rekindling the interest in Vergilian allegory that inspired the reprinting of Landino’s so-called Allegorica Platonica in 1577 and afterward. Also relevant to the focus of this study, Fabrini kept in current circulation the doctrine of the two Venuses as an explanatory device, reporting its source in Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium and translating Landino faithfully in his assertion that the heavenly Venus “means nothing else than the Intelligence, that is, to us, the Angelic mind, which by a certain natural love desires to contemplate the beauty of God.”75 Likewise, Fabrini’s commentary articulates the ‹gural link between Dido’s lust and the mere earthly or “inchoate” civic virtues, when he explains that “through Dido Vergil shows the active and civil life,” but because this life “is occupied with things corporeal,” Dido herself is “assaulted by the beauty of the body”—“diverted from an honest and chaste aim to a dishonest and shameless one”—while Aeneas and the Trojans, “by the allurements of mortal things, abandon virtue and give themselves to vanity.”76 In sum, at the very least there was good reason—in the form of a massive , elaborate, recent precedent—for Torquato Tasso, when he ‹rst endeavored to defend his Gerusalemme liberata against its critics, to do so in the form of an explication of its “allegorical and moral meaning.” But I would go further. An analysis of Tasso’s epic, which follows in chapter 3, reveals that the Augustinian allegory of Petrarch’s Africa and the tradition of allegorical interpretations of the Aeneid were as fundamental to Tasso’s conception of his aims and methods in Gerusalemme liberata as was his other, far better known intention to reconcile the dangerous multiplicity of romance with the ideal unity of epic.77 Renaissance Allegories of the Aeneid 73 = ...